For public comments on the "Music Discovery Requirements" document, lead by a subgroup of MLA's Emerging Technologies Committee

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Draft 1

A group comprised of members of MLA’s Emerging Technologies committee and others is creating a a“Music Discovery Requirements” document which outlines the specialized needs of music materials for discovery interfaces of all kinds, including OPACs, next-gen tools, web-scale, etc. We have completed an initial draft of this document and invite your comments, thoughts, and suggestions.

The document and its two accompanying spreadsheets are available here:

5 comments:

Thanks for including a link to the 048 search at the University of North Texas. The address given in the paper goes to our staging server. At the moment, that works, but I believe that the same URL minus ":2082" will go to the "live" server and work equally well - and be valid longer.

This is a fantastic, thorough, extensive document. Kudos! I have a few comments:

1) It might be helpful to mention Medium of Performance in the "Musical Works" section, if only to refer to the extensive treatment in a later section. As Medium of performance is a prominent work-level attribute, its absence in the "Musical Works" section was conspicuous.

2) Under "Identifying Numbers", there is also the 383 field in MARC, which was recently enhanced with new subfields. Also, 7xx $n could be added.

3) Under "Titles", you mention the problem in current discovery systems with names and titles. We have implemented an improvement to this functionality in our local system (http://searchworks.stanford.edu). 7xx name-title entries, as well as 100/240 combinations are clickable as a unit, and search a special index. I'm not necessarily suggesting you *cite* SearchWorks, but I thought you'd be interested to know about it.

4) "Format": you mention the capability of adding Content Type to access points in RDA. LC just updated their Policy Statement on this (see LCPS 6.27.3), proscribing the addition of content type. Additionally, the MLA RDA Music Implementation Task Force will be grappling with a best-practice recommendation for this. I won't speculate as to our likely decision, but suffice it to say there is strong sentiment against it.

5) "Identifying numbers": As far as I'm aware, RDA doesn't require transcribing *all* music publisher/plate numbers. The "Core" requirement is to transcribe an identifier for the manifestation that is "internationally recognized" (e.g. ISBN, ISMN), with other identifiers being optional. However, the aforementioned task force may very well recommend full transcription. Stay tuned...

I wonder if LC's MARC-to-MODS mapping for 045 (to subject.temporal) is too generalized for music? In the MARC definition, most types of material use 045 for a time depicted, and only music and naturally occurring objects define it for date of creation. For music, the MODS element would be a better translation of 045. Though given low use of 045 in music cataloging, this may not matter much.

Casey - thanks for the additions and the RDA updates. Regarding #1, we'll need to figure out a way to incorporate this also into the expressions/manifestations section since medium of performance can also be an expression level attribute. Regarding #2, we probably should add 240n also.

Stephen - this makes me think that we may want to revisit our recommendation to index 045 also, at least in a general interface, since it's defined differently for other formats.

My comment turned out a bit obscure as posted. The suggestion was to use the MODS element "originInfo.dateCreated" as a mapping for 045 for music. I think I wrapped the element name in angle brackets--maybe that cause it to disappear when posted? Oh, well. Happy Thanksgiving!